Shanghai was now home. Although half of those who came out on
the SS Devanha with him would leave Shanghai before the end of
1922, Tinkler would return to England just once, and would only ever
leave Asia twice before his death. Police stations, hostels and company
flats variously and anonymously provided the accommodation in
which he lived; hotels, cabarets and resorts the world in which he
played. The first of his perches was the Shanghai Municipal Police
Training Depot on Gordon Road. Here Tinkler and his colleagues
were introduced to the SMP, to Shanghailander society and to the
city itself. Through this depot the force aimed to turn recruits into
policemen, and Britons into Shanghailanders. They would learn about
the force they had joined, and the city in which it policed. It would
teach them the written regulations as well as the unwritten laws and
practices which underpinned British colonialism in general, and the
Shanghai Settlement, and the British community in particular. It would
make empire men of them.

The Shanghai Municipal Police brought order to the bustling hyperactivity of the International Settlement. Dating back to 1854, the SMP
had grown from a small complement of Britons recruited from the
Hong Kong police into a large and ethnically diverse force. At the
start of 1919, Commissioner of Police Kenneth John McEuen led a
mixed complement of 146 foreigners (nearly all of them Britons):
a recently established Japanese branch of 30 men whose purpose was
to cope with the rapid increase in the Japanese population of the
Settlement, especially in the Northern District of Hongkew; 370 Sikhs
(first recruited in 1884); and 1,400 Chinese constables and sergeants
(first recruited in 1864). These men also helped supervise 470 Chinese

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